By pure chance, I re-discovered one of the earliest newsletters I used to read at the dawn of blogging.

That it's still going strong after 17 years (still the same author, albeit under a new name and on a new platform) is already quite remarkable, but what prompted me to post about it here, is that they accept bitcoin donations nowadays.

From its humble beginnings when "the infant universe of social media was filled with the primordial matter of MySpace", my old friend seems to have survived and thrived.

The author, Maria Popova, reflects on the history of the newsletter here:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/10/23/16-learnings/

A few quotes from the above that may resonate with bitcoiners:

I decided to take a night class and learn to code — it seemed the simplest solution for maximal self-reliance.

In those early years, working my banal day jobs hostage to my visa and the demands of my metabolism, not once did it occur to me that this labor of love would become both the pulse-beat of my life and the sole source of my livelihood. And yet, in a baffling blur of time and chance — the anthropocentric term for which is luck — the seven friends somehow became several million readers without much effort on my behalf beyond the daily habit of showing up for the blank page.

We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates.

Emphasis mine.